Umberto Eco: Trending quotes (page 4)

“We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.”

“When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.”

“Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.”

“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.”

“A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”

“Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.”

“True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.”

“It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.”

“Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”

“All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.”

“A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.”

“Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.”

“Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.”

“The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.”

“When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.”

“How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.”

“Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.”

“I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”

“How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by
the often perverse wisdom of man!”